During this time of personal retreat, I'll be sharing some passages to inspire thought and reflection. With the following, I invite you to take a quiet moment to read and notice what thoughts arise for you during and afterward.--TanujaThere is a distinction to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to--and, if attended to, discloses--our souls. And yet it is a distinction without a difference, perhaps, and as crucial to eventually overcome as it is to initially understand. To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experince it as such.

It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits.

from Christopher Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013